


The Quicker Path

by Steerpike13713, Zappy



Series: Paths [1]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: (not between garcy), 1920s, But Not In The Usual Way, F/M, Fake Marriage, Jealousy, Kidfic, Sort Of, Trapped in the Past, no actual kid shows up, outside pov, poor communication causes angst, post-2x08, staggering coincidences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 04:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14824958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zappy/pseuds/Zappy
Summary: On a mission, the team are separated and Lucy and Flynn are abandoned in New York in early 1920.A few days later on their end, the team goes to pick them up from 1923, and finds that more has changed in the intervening three years than they were bargaining for.





	The Quicker Path

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first go at writing for this fandom, and I haven't quite got all the characters' voices down yet. I also feel I should apologise to Rufus for using his POV as an outside POV for a shipfic when he's so very done with all this drama in the finale.  
> Should add, this probably isn't a fic for big fans of Wyatt Logan, as while I don't actually hate him, the worst of his behaviour in S2 is on display here, since having him deal with things gracefully would at this point just be OOC.  
> Final addition - I have done my best with the historical research, but there are probably still some major flaws in it. So, any historians reading this, please don't crucify me for getting things wrong.  
> (The fic is not, alas, Garcy-heavy, due to my narrator, but I do plan a slightly more shippy companion piece from Lucy's POV.)

The mission had been a disaster from start to finish. Rittenhouse had taken an interest in the First Red Scare of the early ‘20s, and, Rittenhouse being Rittenhouse, Rufus didn’t like to imagine just what the intended effects had been. As it was, they’d nearly succeeded in broadening the expulsion of five socialist members of the New York State Assembly to allow for the expulsion of any political party that was deemed to have ‘been elected on a platform that was absolutely inimical to the best interests of the state of New York and the United States’ - read: anything that didn’t serve the interests of Rittenhouse and the cabal of rich old white men who ran the organisation. They’d managed to scupper that one - barely, and the expulsion itself no longer happened either, courtesy of one of Flynn’s bullets to the head of Rittenhouse’s man in the Assembly, one Thaddeus C. Sweet, before he could call for a vote on the subject, which Lucy hadn’t been too thrilled with even if she admitted the guy was a dick. The trouble was, Wyatt had taken two bullets and ended up concussed before they managed to get out of the building, and with Flynn and Lucy still busy hunting up the sleeper agent they’d been sent after, and Rittenhouse’s goons hard on their tail, there hadn’t been much choice but to hightail it back to the present and come back later for the other two.

That had been most of a week ago. Wyatt’s injuries had forced them to go for an actual hospital under a fake ID -  Rufus was still pretty sure that someone must’ve noticed an alias like ‘Tom Clancy’ in this century, but apparently not - and the bullets had caught him one in the side and one in the leg. He wasn’t fully recovered yet, even, but staying in hospital any longer with Rittenhouse on the loose wouldn’t do anyone any good, least of all Wyatt. Jiya and Rufus could’ve done gone back alone, together or either one of them alone, but the 1920s weren’t going anywhere and with the sort of firepower Rittenhouse had been packing Agent Christopher had put her foot down on the idea of going back without a soldier.

Just to make matters worse, going back to the same time and place they’d left was out - the storehouse they’d been hiding the Lifeboat in had already been compromised, and they hadn’t a clue where Lucy and Flynn would’ve gone other than there. Within a day or two, Flynn and Lucy would’ve had to go to ground to avoid detection either by Rittenhouse or the 1920s police. Finding two people who had every reason to keep a low profile in all of 1920s New York would be tricky enough at the best of times, and since their original meeting place had been pretty thoroughly shot up by the sleeper agents and would probably be being watched by now as well after the mess they’d made with Sweet, it was back to Google to see what they could find. It wasn’t much. Either the timeline somehow hadn’t changed, and this was a sign that they’d get Flynn and Lucy back before anything could happen to change the timeline, just like they had with JFK, or whatever it was they had been doing, they hadn’t drawn attention to themselves doing it. Jiya had gone through everything Lucy owned looking for some sort of clue, but turned up nothing, and they were all racking their brains to remember anything either she or Flynn might’ve said that would give them a hint as to where to look. It had been Jiya’s idea, in the end, to browse the genealogy sites too. The family-tree stuff was about the best place to find records of ordinary - well, apparently ordinary - people, and if there were any sort of public records remaining out there, that’d be where they showed up. Same trick Jiya’d used to track down why Lucy’s sister had disappeared. Rufus hadn’t thought it’d do much good, considering those sorts of sites basically ran on people putting family photos and such up online, and that wasn’t going to do them much good in this case. He’d managed to cling onto that belief for about a week before Jiya proved him wrong. Rufus just wished it’d been in a slightly less depressing context.

It was death records, was the thing. Garcia Flynn, died 1947 in Queens, New York. From the pictures, it was the same Flynn. That was...ok, gloomy, morbid, kind of stunning in a ‘memento mori’ sort of way, as if Rufus needed the reminder right now...but sort of expected. If they didn’t go back and get him, that was when Flynn was going to die. That was when Flynn was going to have died until they went back and got him. He made it through WWII at least, though he’d be...what, sixty, when the US got involved with that one. That was the expected one. Slightly less expected were the rest of the records Jiya had turned up. Death record for a Lucy Flynn in the mid-1950s was even more dizzying to think about, but might’ve passed muster - it was the twenties, and for all the images of fast-living flappers Rufus had grown up with, enough visits to that part of history had made it pretty clear Lucy and Flynn had a choice of two cover stories, ‘married’ or ‘related’, and those two did _not_ look alike enough to pull off being brother and sister - but then there was the birth certificate. Amy Lorena Flynn, born November 1924 in the Lower East Side. She was still alive, even, ninety-four years old and living in Boston.

“...no,” he said, staring at the screen over Jiya’s shoulder. “No, this- There’s got to be some- I mean, you’re great,” he added quickly, “But...you’re sure she’s theirs? Her parents couldn’t be...some...other...Lucy and Garcia Flynn…?” he trailed off. How many couples with those names could there be? And ‘Amy Lorena’ was too big a coincidence if it wasn’t.

Jiya grimaced. “Nope. Definitely theirs. Look.” She brought up an image, a black-and-white family group. Professionally done, posed, a little stiff-looking in the way these old photos tended to be. The little girl in the picture was...maybe ten years old, at a push. Flynn and Lucy were recognisable in the picture- a decade and a half older, but still themselves - looking...surprisingly good, actually, considering there was a depression going on. Then again, they’d have known to plan ahead. None of which made up for the sheer surreality of the idea in the least.

“How the hell did that happen?” Rufus muttered. Jiya gave him a teasing look. “I mean...I _know_ how, but...how?”

“You’ve found something?” Connor called from the couch, where he was busy with his own, less legal, research.

“...yeah,” Rufus said after a moment. “Jiya did. You’re...going to want to see this. Agent Christopher too.”

There was a long, stunned pause when the four of them finally gathered around the laptop.

“This is real?” Christopher asked after a few seconds, frowning at the image.

Connor snorted. “Does it matter?”

Christopher shot him a sharp look, “Of course it matters. If this is real then they became parents, we can’t just erase that.”

“Well, if it _is_ real it makes all our jobs a lot more difficult,” Connor allowed, “But if you’ve got any suggestions about where _else_ we’re supposed to find a historian who’ll work with us when we’re on the run and can’t even pay them, I’m all ears. Besides, it’s not as if either of them _wanted_ to get stuck in the twenties, was it?”

It with a heavy sigh that Agent Christopher tilted her head to concede the point, though she looked far from happy about it. “That doesn’t mean they’ll want their daughter erased from history.”

“Who’s to say she will be?” Connor said, shrugging. “She might just end up being born a few decades later.”

Rufus blinked. “...seriously?”

“We don't know for sure either way, what happened in those four years.” Agent Christopher cut in.

“So let's pick them up before it happens.”

Christopher glared at him. “Lucy’s already lost her sister to timeline interference. How do you think she’ll take finding out she’s lost her daughter too?”

“I didn’t propose we _tell_ her about it.”

Jiya and Rufus shared an uneasy look at that, Christopher stared at Connor with a dangerously flat expression, “You don't want to tell them about their _daughter_.”

“As soon as they're back here, where they _belong_ , only the team that picks them up will even know.”

Rufus stared at him. “What- Look, I don’t understand this any more than you do, but we can’t just not _tell_ them something like this.”

“What _good_ would it do to tell them? We’re not picking them up while they have her, obviously, we can’t bring a _child_ into this bunker - it’s bad enough with just the seven of us living here.”

Christopher’s mouth pressed into a thin, worried line, “Having a baby right now wouldn't be ideal...no.”

“I don’t know!” Rufus admitted, “But it’s something they need to know!”

Agent Christopher looked away with a pensive expression before turning to the three of them, “God help me, but I think this time ignorance is bliss.”

“Like it was when it was your family?” Jiya said suddenly. The room abruptly became very quiet.

Christopher was obviously holding in a reaction and Rufus was almost scared to know what kind. “I asked Lucy to hold onto that information for my family because I can't bear to forget them. I know that makes me a hypocrite, but if we leave things as they are then they both die in the 20th century. Giving the both of them the additional heartache, right now, after everything? We’re barely matching Rittenhouse as it is, they need to be focused. Fresh grief won't let either of them do that.”

“And if they find out anyway?” Rufus demanded. “We all know how long the recording devices lasted - you’re sure no-one who went on the mission and remembers this timeline won’t let it slip by accident?”

“Beyond whoever goes to get them, and maybe a Rittenhouse agent, but would they really trust what they say?” Connor shrugged as if it were no possibility at all. As if he didn’t remember just how badly the last time Rufus had been ordered to lie to his friends had gone.

“Probably not,” Rufus admitted, “But what about whoever gets sent? You need either me or Jiya to pilot the Lifeboat, and both of us know…”

“I’m not lying to them,” Jiya put in quickly, “Not about this. It’s...they deserve to know. We can tell them, and they can decide what to do with it. If they come back or...”

“Look, if we tell them when we pick them up, what do you think will happen? If you tell them _after_ , well it's too late to change at that point, isn't it?”

Rufus looked down at the laptop again. It wasn’t as if erasing people from history was really anything new. It was just- Before, it had always been an accident. He’d never known the people. He didn’t know Amy Flynn either, but it was different, seeing the little girl in the picture and talking about making it so she was never born in the first place - because for all Connor’s justifications, without the pressure of being the only people they could ever really rely on, the odds of Flynn and Lucy having a kid together looked to be somewhere in the vicinity of ‘nonexistent’.

“So we give them an option,” Christopher said. “Hell of a lot of pressure to put on them, but they deserve that much. Jiya, dig up everything you can and put it on a flashdrive.”

Jiya nodded, and resumed typing. “Got it. Amy’s pretty well documented - Oh, wow. Same Amy Flynn that did a few of the screenplays for _Star Trek_ \- she wrote that one you complained about last time, with the Caitians and the female starship captain?”

“No such episode,” Rufus said, blinking.

“Yeah, there is, it’s- Oh. Time travel. Right.” Jiya slumped a little. “Shame, I loved that ep. Ok, she had a few reasonably successful pulp novels in the forties and fifties before getting into sci-fi in the sixties...”

“I could’ve done without knowing that,” Rufus muttered. It was bad enough talking about erasing his friend’s kid from time without knowing anything about the kid herself.

“I’ll put the episode on the drive too,” Jiya decided, fingers flying over the keys. “There needs to be _one_ copy of it out there or I will literally die.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that,” Connor said, smiling a little. “Is that the plan, then? We tell them about their wonderful, accomplished future daughter and let them decide whether to erase her or not.”

There was a very long, still pause in which no-one spoke, and Rufus didn’t know what his reply would be. Fortunately - or possibly not - he was spared the trouble of replying when the klaxon went off. The Mothership had made another jump.

Connor crossed over to check. “New York,” he said, “The sixteenth of October 1923. Doesn’t sound too familiar.”

“Not to me, either,” Rufus agreed, “Though, we are kinda short a historian right now. Wikipedia have anything?”

A few clicks, and Jia shook her head. “Nothing I can see. Last thing that shows up  in New York is some sort of newspaper strike, but that was over by the end of September.”

The door creaked as it swung open and Wyatt hurried in, still limping slightly. No sign of Jessica, but then, she’d mostly kept herself to herself ever since they got back from the ‘80s. “Mothership moved again?”

“Yes,” Agent Christopher said shortly, “Middle of October, 1923. No clear indications about what they’re after this time.”

“Then we’d better get going fast before they find whatever it is,” Wyatt said, straightening up a bit.

Agent Christopher was already shaking her head. “No, absolutely not, you’re still not recovered from the last time-”

“So, what, we just let Rittenhouse do what they want until I’m in top shape again? That could take months, and last I looked we don’t have that long!”

“It’s only been a week, and you haven’t had the all-clear to go back into the field-”

“I’m never going to, officially, what with _being on the run_ and all,” Wyatt reminded her. “I’ll be fine.”

“We don’t really have much of a choice,” Connor said ruefully, catching Christopher’s eye.

She huffed out a breath. “Fine. Don’t get yourself hurt any worse - you can collect Flynn and Lucy while you’re there, we’ve managed to track them down to somewhere in the Lower East Side in 1924, so they’re probably in that area. With any luck Lucy will have a guess at what they’re really after.”

Wyatt nodded. “Right. Cool. You ready?” he added, looking at Rufus. Rufus had...well, all right, there were things he had felt less ready for before. Asking Jiya out. That first mission with the team. Spying for Rittenhouse. Still. It didn’t get easier. He nodded anyway.

“Give me a minute!” Jiya said quickly, scrabbling in the desk drawer for a spare drive. “I haven’t got everything yet!”

“And the Lifeboat’s not fully charged,” Connor put in. “Won’t be for another hour, unless we want to completely overload the power grid again.”

“An hour?” Wyatt demanded. “Rittenhouse could be doing anything!”

“Not as if the 1920s are going anywhere,” Agent Christopher said briskly, “I’ll take a look at those injuries - if I don’t think they’re healed enough, you’re not going anywhere.”

*

The Lower East Side of the 1920s was not short of empty warehouses in which a time machine could be hidden, at least. Stepping out onto the streets afterward, though...that was something. They hadn’t been to these parts of the past much before - the sort of capital-H History that Rittenhouse liked to have a hand in tended to happen uptown, wherever that happened to be. Generally speaking, it was fancy hotels, government facilities, upmarket offices, swanky Paris nightclubs, whenever they got this close to the present day. Not this time.

Rufus had been to the Lower East Side before, almost a hundred years from now. There’d been a con on in New York, but his flight wasn’t until evening the day after, so he’d spent his last day in town playing tourist. Then, the place had been littered with boutiques and bistros, all of them absurdly overpriced and none of them anything like this place. Here and now, the streets were still thronged with people - no part of NYC had ever been quiet - but in place of trendy fusion restaurants and overpriced clothes there were fabric merchants and butchers and street-corner salesmen hawking a dozen different foods. Painted signs on the brickwork advertised cigarettes and canned vegetables and the streets were alive with the rattle of handcarts.

“...almost feel bad about stealing these,” Rufus muttered, glancing down at his stolen suit and tugging at the too-short sleeves. “So...what, do we just ask around, show pictures until someone gives us an address?”  
“Got a better idea?”

Rufus didn’t, but he rather wished they’d had more to go on than ‘they’ll be in the Lower East Side next year and, oh, by the way, they’ll have a baby by then’. No-one had told Wyatt about that one. Maybe everyone else had thought it was for the best - why burden anyone else with the secret, when they’d all have forgotten it except Rufus by the time they all got back? He’d tell them, Rufus promised himself. If it had been him and Jiya who ended up in the twenties, he’d want to know they’d have a kid. He didn’t know if he’d choose to stay, if he found that out - for a whole wide variety of reasons, life in the 1920s would absolutely _suck_ for him and Jiya and any kids they might have - but he’d want to have the choice all the same.

“Nope,” he said, “Ask at the grocery store first? They’ve got to have been eating something, right?”

“Good plan.”

That was underestimating just how many grocery stores, bodegas and dry goods stores there were in the Lower East Side. Quite a lot, as it turned out. And they’d tramped through half a dozen of them and were on their way up towards a part of town Rufus was pretty sure had been called the East Village when he passed through on that sightseeing trip, that they even began to get close.

“No, I haven’t seen her,” says the little old Eastern European lady behind the counter of the dry goods store on this latest street corner, giving them a sharp, disapproving look. “And who’re you meant to be that’s asking?”

“I’m her-”

“Brother!” Rufus cuts in quickly, shooting Wyatt a frantic ‘just-go-with-it’ sort of look, “From back west. They, uh, haven’t spoken in a while. Have you seen her?”

The woman gave him a beady-eyed look. “She doesn’t live here,” she said - lied, Rufus thought. People always gave him funny looks any time before the mid-sixties, the sort of looks that said that these were people who didn’t even have to _hide_ that they’d quite like to call the cops on him just for breathing the same air as them. People were giving him funny looks now, but not the same kind. They were looking at him and Wyatt the way he looked at cops. No way that was a coincidence. “Down towards the waterfront,” the old woman went on, “They live down that way. Not here.”

Wyatt and Rufus shared a look. That was the way they’d come, and no-one had known Lucy’s face. They were _definitely_ on the right track.

“What about this man?” Wyatt pressed, producing Flynn’s picture. This time, the woman didn’t even glance at it.

“They don’t live here!” she repeated. “Down by the waterfront.”

“Uh- Thank you, then, for your time,” Rufus supplied, “We’ll just…”

He could feel eyes on his back the whole way out of the store.

“Ok, so they definitely know where Lucy and Flynn are,” he said as soon as they were safely out of earshot. “Probably somewhere ‘round here. And people are willing to cover for it that they don’t want to be found. That’s got to be a good sign.”

“Yeah, except it means _we_ can’t find them either,” Wyatt muttered. “Think there’s anyone ‘round here who’d tell us if we offered a cash reward?”

Rufus paused. It seemed like a close-knit neighbourhood, from what he could tell...but, hell, even close-knit neighbourhoods had their weak links. On the other hand… “I think that’d just make it even more suspicious.” He paused, and added. “Wait - do we even have any cash? Because last I looked, Connor can’t provide us period currency anymore.”

Wyatt scowled. “Shit.”

They asked anyway, because they couldn’t leave it at that, but apparently the word had got out. Most of the people they tried to talk to hurried away without even looking at the pictures, and a fair few seemed genuinely not to have seen either of them. It took another hour before they finally found someone willing to answer their questions, a skinny little old man with coke-bottle glasses who peered through them at the photo before pronouncing.

“Oh, you’re looking for the schoolteacher, are you?”

Rufus nodded, “Yes! I mean, I think we are-” He glanced at Wyatt. “Do you know where she’d be at this sort of time?”

“Probably on her way home,” the old man replied benignly. “Or off to one of her meetings - always rushing about, that girl…And some of her ideas about schoolwork - what’s wrong with the three ‘R’s? They were good enough for me!”

Rufus cleared his throat. “Uh- meetings?”

The man waved a hand. “She’s one of them wossnames - Suffragettes! Or whatever they call ‘em now they have the damn vote.”

 _That_ sounded like Lucy.

“Can you give us an address?” Wyatt cut in.

The old man shook his head. “Don’t know her that well. Just what my grandson says. Why, is she in trouble?”

“No,” Rufus said hastily. “No, definitely not.”

“Not from us, anyway,” Wyatt muttered. “Can you tell us where she teaches?”

He could, as it happened, not that it did any good - it was an hour after schools let out for the day, and wherever Lucy would be by now, it probably wouldn’t be there. This sort of thing was so much easier when there was a major historical figure Rittenhouse would be after. The trouble was, without Lucy’s expertise, they had no idea what that might be.

They headed up towards the school building anyway, because even if neither of them was quite sure if schools were keeping paper records of their staff on-site yet, someone there would probably at least know the address, and it was the nearest thing they had to a lead.

They were about halfway there when a woman in a dark red woollen coat with an armful of paper bag nearly walked straight into them.

“-sorry!” said a familiar voice, and then. “Wait-”

“Lucy!” Wyatt exclaimed, going for a hug before being thwarted by the bag in Lucy’s arms.  
“Wyatt! Rufus!” Lucy looked from one of them to the other, looking somewhere between overjoyed and furious. “It has been _three years_ , what took you so long?”

“Nice to see you too,” Rufus snarked. “Look, we’re sorry, but the Mothership jumped before Wyatt was finished recovering, so we had to come after them and-”

“No, it’s fine. I get it.” Lucy paused for a moment and frowned. “How long have they been here?”

“I don’t know - maybe a day?” Rufus’ stomach lurched. “They could’ve done anything by now, but without you we didn’t know what they could be after, so-”

“Only a day?” Lucy frowned. “I don’t remember anything-” she shook her head and glanced around the street. “Never mind, we should continue this somewhere a bit less...exposed.”

“Agreed,” Wyatt said ruefully, “So, guessing you found a place? Since you’re all…” he made a vague gesture. “Settled in and all.”

Lucy nodded. “We’ve got a couple of rented rooms two streets over, if you don’t mind it being cramped,” she said distractedly, “But- Why would they come _here_? Lloyd George left the city days ago, and it’s not like them to care about foreign dignitaries unless there’s some sort of American ripple effect-”

“Save it for when we’re out of the open,” Wyatt advised. “So...what’ve you been doing since we left you?”

Lucy put a hand to the brim of her hat and shook her head. “Uh- Garcia and I figured out after a couple days that you weren’t coming, so we pawned what we could from our first sets of stolen clothes and pooled the money together for rent. It’s a good thing we had expensive tastes the first time around, or we’d have been in even more trouble.”

“Oh, so it’s ‘Garcia’ now?” Wyatt demanded, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes,” Lucy said coolly. “It is.”

There was another long, awkward pause.

“So, schoolteacher, huh? History, I’m guessing.” Rufus said, trying desperately to change the subject.

“Yes,” Lucy said distractedly. “It’s not what I’m used to, but there didn’t seem to be much point clawing to re-establish myself as an academic when I didn’t know how long we’d even _be_ in this time period.”

Rufus coughed, abruptly reminded of the fact that the original answer to that question had been something like ‘thirty-six years’. “The plan was to come and get you the day after we left, but this came up first,” he said awkwardly.

Lucy nodded. “Right. We can just come back with you now, though. Not that these last three years have always been easy, but as ways of studying social history go, _living_ it has been…something.”

Rufus blinked.

“Uh...sure,” Wyatt said, sounding faintly bemused. “I mean, that was already the plan, to bring you back, so-”

“Good.” They turned left at the next intersection, along a row of rather battered-looking brownstone tenement buildings. It was already starting to get dark by now. “We’re on the third floor,” Lucy said, apropos of nothing, as they reached the second set of steps. “We might as well keep up the ‘brother’ story for Mrs Esposito - I’d hate to spend my last night in 1923 getting kicked out.”

“You’re not going to be staying anyway, why worry about it?” Wyatt pointed out. Rufus’ stomach tied itself into a tight, guilty knot. All at once, the flashdrive in his pocket felt impossibly heavy.

The hallway was dark and severe and furnished in heavy old-fashioned things that Rufus would bet were even old-fashioned now. It was hard to imagine anyone ever liking them for their own sake, at least. The carpet was old and holey and slipped about under their feet, and looked like it’d make descending the stairs in the dark a dangerous enterprise. They were on the first floor up when a voice came from below.

“That you, Mrs Flynn?”

Rufus saw Wyatt stop dead out of the corner of his eye as Lucy called back.

“Yes, Mrs Esposito!”

Footsteps downstairs, and then. “I heard more than one person going up there.”

“Just my brother, Mrs Esposito.” Lucy sounded distinctly irritated now, “He wants to see where I’ve been living.”

A snort, and then, “Your husband know about this?”

“He knows I have a brother, Mrs Esposito.” Lucy rolled her eyes at Rufus, but since there didn’t come another yell from downstairs she shrugged and turned up the next flight of stairs.

It took about four steps for Wyatt to recover himself. “I’m sorry, _Mrs Flynn_?”

Lucy shifted a little. “It seemed like the most believable story. Not like we could live together any other way - he can’t pass for my brother, and if we tried it as an unmarried, unrelated man and woman we’d get thrown out of the building for indecency. ”

There was a slow nod from Wyatt and a half-muttered, “Right…”

It was more or less the same thought process Rufus had gone through when he first found her death certificate. The problem being, that had been before he knew that she and Flynn were supposed to have their first child just over a year from now, if this visit hadn’t taken place.

“I mean,” Lucy went on, rummaging around in the bag,  “You do _get_ unmarried cohabiting couples in this era, though mostly only among those rich enough to afford a bit of scandal, and there are a few social reformers who recommend it, but it’d still attract a lot more attention than we need right now.”

“Rittenhouse are still looking for you?” Wyatt asked.  
Lucy nodded. “Not too closely - there’s only so much we can do to hide if we ever want to get rescued - but they’re still around. Garcia’s caught up with a few of them already, but since we don’t have exact numbers there might still be a few lurking around. I _know_ one of them tried to avert the inauguration of the American Birth Control League last year, but no-one’s connected me or Garcia to that one yet - I think they pinned it on Two-Knife Altieri in the end-”

She was speaking quietly, and the hall was deserted, but...still.

“Ok,” Rufus said, “Who’s Two-Knife Altieri?”

“Hitter for the Black-Hand Gang,” Lucy said, fumbling a key from out of the bag with her gloved hands, “We’re in here. Might be a bit cramped, but…”

“Hey, after the Lifeboat and the bunker, nothing seems cramped,” Wyatt said easily as the door swung open and Lucy ushered them inside.

“So, just to be clear about this,” Rufus said once they were in, “You and Flynn’ve been going after Rittenhouse here too?”

“Well, we couldn’t just stand around and let them do whatever they wanted, could we?” Lucy said, setting her bag down on the table and stripping off her hat and coat and gloves. It was unnerving, how _natural_ she looked here. But then, this had been her life for three years. Would’ve been her life for nearly forty. It was hard to keep remembering that. He coughed and looked around the apartment instead.

Lucy was right - it _was_ cramped. The room was about big enough for the three of them to stand in, with a rickety table and two chairs, an old-fashioned black range and some pots along the other wall, a few shelves laden with cheap paperbacks and a washstand by the door. On the far side there was a set of folding doors, folded back to give the illusion of more space, revealing a metal-framed double bed, a rail with hanging clothes and another narrow shelf. There was a small gas-lamp on the table, and another on the shelf in the bedroom, both turned off. It made the bunker look downright luxurious by comparison.

“The bathroom is just along the hall, if you need it,” Lucy supplied, “We make do. God, I can’t tell you how long I’ve been _dreaming_ of a proper shower.”

“Yeah, hard to picture you _living_ here…” Wyatt commented as he fully took in their surroundings, “...for three years…” Then he froze and Rufus followed where he was looking. The bed, _singular_ , and its rumpled sheets.

Lucy either didn’t notice or was ignoring it. “It took us a while to get used to the idea too. So, do you have any word on where in New York Rittenhouse are right now? If the Mothership jumped you must have some idea.”

“Uh- Not too far from here, actually,” Rufus admitted. “It’s why we came this way - what was going on in New York today.”

Lucy frowned. “That’s just it...I can’t think of anything. I mean, there are...some things that come close. Uh- David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister began his tour of the Americas here on the 5th, but he’s already left the city. First World Series game at Yankee Stadium was on the 10th, but even if that weren’t most of a week ago, I don’t see Rittenhouse being that interested in a baseball game…” her eyes widened. “The Ku Klux Klan was prohibited from being able to incorporate, 12th of October 1923-”

“That sounds more like it,” Rufus said wearily. Of course Rittenhouse would be all for the Klan.

Lucy shook her head. “Yeah, except that happened last Friday. It was,  uh, an attempt to get around a law that meant they had to provide the government a list of their members. Nothing happens in New York on the 16th of October 1923 that I can think of. I mean, there are some people in the city who’re going to be important at some point in the future, but they’re never this _random_ in when they go after people-”

“What if they’re planting a sleeper?” Rufus asked. “Anybody famous come from around these parts?”

“New York? In the 1920s?” Lucy raked a hand through her hair, pulling it half-free of its pins. “That really doesn’t narrow it down, except- Wait. You said they landed _here_? The Lower East Side?”

“Yeah, like, really close by.” Rufus gave Lucy a questioning look, “Why, that jog something?”

“No! That’s the problem. I- It’s been a few years, but I can’t think of anyone who’d specifically be in this part of the city today. It’s why we chose to hide here - less chance of unwanted attention.”

Wyatt slowly turned back to them, “Do you think _that’s_ why they’re here..?”

Rufus blinked. But, if there was no-one historically important around and nothing historically important to break up… “We tracked you down here, probably so could Rittenhouse,” he agreed. “If they’d got to you before we did-”

The blood drained from Lucy’s face. “Garcia’s at the docks tonight,” she said in a low, urgent voice, already reaching for her hat. “There’s some sort of shipment coming in, and it’ll be off the books. Perfect place for an ambush - if anyone gets caught in the crossfire it’ll just look like a gang fight, and the cops don’t look into those too closely - half of them are on the take and the other half want to keep drinking.”

“Let me get this right, Flynn’s doing something illegal. Why am I not surprised?” Wyatt grumbled.

Lucy gave him a very sharp look at that. “You have to admit, he’s not really cut out for office work.” She checked her watch. “The shipment’s due in just after dark, but he’ll probably be at the Blind Tiger by now to go over the plan. We’ve got an hour.”

“Well then let’s go before it’s too late. Faster we can get him, faster we can leave.”

Lucy nodded, and grabbed her coat, buttoning it up as she went. “The Blind Tiger is up towards the Bowery. Has a front as a tobacconist. You go in, you ask for three packs of Camels, Tony behind the counter will ask if there’s anything else, and you say that you’d like a bit of what the doctor ordered to get through to the bar.”

“...we’re going to a speakeasy,” Rufus summarised. Sometimes, he almost felt he was getting used to this job. Then he had to say things like that and was abruptly reminded of just how _insane_ it all was.

Lucy gave him a smile over her shoulder, “We’re going to a speakeasy.”

They attracted a few odd looks on the way across to the Bowery. Not all of them aimed at Rufus, even, which would normally be a win. Lucy seemed to notice too, and muttered something under her breath, trying to tuck her wayward hair back under her hat before they attracted any more attention. By the time they got to the street Lucy had named, though, the stares had tapered off.

Kovac’s Tobacco was deserted when they got there, except for the heavyset man behind the counter, whose expression softened a little at the sight of Lucy, then hardened back again when Rufus and Wyatt ducked in after her.

“Odd company you’re keeping,” the man rumbled.

“My brother and his friend,” Lucy lied, giving him a sharp look, “Have they left yet?”

“Nope. Been in there half the afternoon. Something big’s starting. Here to buy?”

“Three packets of Camels, please.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Somethin’ serious happening for you two?”

“I’d rather just talk to him about it.”

“Fair enough. Anything else?”

“Just a bit of what the doctor ordered,” Lucy said, her mouth twitching up at the corner. And then they were in. Although, Rufus had to say, when he’d heard ‘speakeasy’, he’d expected something more like the Dingo Club back in Paris. Not, say, a cold New York basement beneath a tobacco store, made even more cramped by the addition of a multitude of rickety tables and a makeshift bar at one end. There was a door at the far end of the room, and half the tables were already occupied. Lucy’s lips thinned.

“I hadn’t heard there was anything that big going on,” she muttered.

Wyatt snorted. “Oh, and Flynn’d tell you if there were?”

“Yes.” Lucy looked away. “He usually does. Best if we both know the odds of the other getting killed at any given moment, and that’s been more of a worry for him than for me since we got here.”

She headed for the bar, moving fast, leaving Wyatt and Rufus trailing after her.

The skinny kid behind the bar grinned when he saw her. “Oh, hey, Mrs F.”

“Hey. Can I talk to my husband? It’s urgent.”

The kid’s eyes widened, and then flicked over the other two. “Uh. Not sure I can do that for you. He’s in a meeting. Somethin’ about a new gang down towards Chinatown. Going to cause trouble.”

Lucy muttered something under her breath that Rufus was pretty sure they didn’t like women saying in the ‘20s.

“Any idea when they’ll be out?”

“No, ma’am.”

Lucy huffed a breath. “Ok. Can you get a message to him? My family’s just turned up.”

“Eeesh. Same family who-”

“Same ones.”

The kid nodded, “I’ll tell him.”

Lucy stepped away from the bar and breathed in deeply, before stalking off to find a table.

Once they were at the table Wyatt asked what was on both their minds, “Family turning up?”

“Garcia knows it means...well. Rittenhouse.” Lucy’s mouth twitched again. “We sort of gave it out that my family...didn’t approve of me running off with an immigrant. We needed an excuse about why I had the pearls, so ‘rich family’ made sense, and if people thought I was in trouble because of it, they’d be less willing to answer questions. _Especially_ if my mother came along for the ride.”

“Ok, so as far as anyone here knows, you two are Romeo and Juliet?” Wyatt sounded flatly disbelieving.

“We’re both alive so far, so no.”

Wyatt was just about to snap back at her when a woman hurried over from one of the other tables.

“Lucy! There you are - got a minute, honey?”

There was a brief, awkward pause.

“I...can,” Lucy said, “What’s the matter?”

“People’ve been asking questions,” the woman said in a hurry, “I know some of us know why you don’t want people looking, but everyone else...it looks suspicious, honey, and if the school board thinks you’re involved in something-”

“Like this?” Wyatt muttered. The woman stopped, and gave him a very nasty look.

“I’m fine, Queenie,” Lucy said quickly.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” the woman said, side-eying Wyatt and Rufus. “Of course, I gave ‘em the runaround - sent them all the way up to the Village looking for you.”

“That’s sweet of you, but no, it’s fine. I just need to talk to Garcia about something.”

“You sure, honey? I know you’re a real bearcat but it looks like you’ve got a bimbo here.”

Rufus tried manfully not to snicker and snuck a sideways look at Wyatt, who looked as if someone had hit him around the face with a wet fish.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Lucy said, snorting, “Stop making eyes, he’s married.”

Rufus looked at Lucy and was surprised by how easily she said that when last week, for them anyway, she was still hesitating before acknowledging it. There was no pain in her voice now.

“All the good ones are,” Queenie sighed. “Ok, if you’re sure. I’d be careful, though, those guys ain’t going to stay up in the Village forever.” She got up and wandered back over to the door, Lucy frowning after her.

“Strange,” she muttered, “Queenie has a better memory for faces than that.”  
“Yeah,” Rufus said, “And no-one told _us_ you were in Greenwich Village.”

“Rittenhouse, then,” Lucy said grimly. “Looks like you got here just in time, if it’s really us they’re after.”

“Then we can’t waste much time, what’s taking Flynn so long?”

“He might not be able to get out easily - gangsters aren’t exactly known for being forgiving employers.” Lucy’s eyes were still on the door and she was fidgeting with a ring on her finger that Rufus hadn’t noticed before.

“Yeah, and Rittenhouse isn’t known for wasting time,” Wyatt hissed back.

Of course, it was about then that the door opened, and a group of hard-faced men in cheap dark suits filed out. Lucy didn’t quite leap up from the table...but she came close.

“Finally,” Rufus muttered. Even he was starting to feel exposed, sitting here not knowing where Rittenhouse was or what they were after. He craned his neck, trying to catch a glimpse of Flynn, but the choking noise Wyatt made a moment later made that quite unnecessary.  
Rufus looked around wildly for a moment, and then he spotted what it was that had so riveted Wyatt’s attention. Lucy had found Flynn. And...well. Ok. Now it was much easier to imagine that those two were supposed to be having a kid in a little over a year’s time.

“Hey! Bank’s closed, you two!” someone called from the far side of the room, to a smattering of laughter, and the two of them broke apart. Lucy stayed on her toes, though, and tightened her grip on Flynn’s elbow, pointing over at the table where Wyatt and Rufus were sitting and talking very fast.

When Rufus looked back at him, Wyatt was openly staring. “...you know about this?” he asked, in a tone Rufus couldn’t quite read.

“...yeah,” Rufus admitted. “Well, sort of - the death records we tracked them by were for a Garcia and Lucy Flynn. I sort of assumed it was just a cover, though, I mean, at first…” his stomach twisted with guilt, but...well. He couldn’t exactly tell Wyatt before he told Lucy. Or even Flynn, getting him shot or no. Either way, Lucy and Flynn were headed straight for them, gangsters be damned.

“Wyatt, Rufus. This running off and leaving half the team behind thing is starting to look like a habit,” Flynn said, by way of greeting.

“There were three of us on the Kennedy thing,” Rufus pointed out. “This was - well, next year was - the closest time we could track you to.”

“ _The next day_ wasn’t an option-?” Flynn started, but Lucy interrupted him.

“Can this wait? If it really is just us Rittenhouse is after, the last thing we need is to waste time bickering when they could be hunting us down.”

Flynn shut up with a slight tensing of his jaw but glanced at Lucy and huffed, “Lucy is right of course. Where’s the lifeboat?”

“Warehouse by the docks,” Wyatt said shortly, glaring at Flynn.

Flynn nodded. “Which warehouse?”

Rufus rattled off the street address and saw Flynn wince. “What?”

“It’s right next to where the handover’s due to take place.” Flynn’s eyes flicked back over to the rest of the little group of dark-suited men over by the bar. “And these might be fairly small-time criminals, but they take any perceived betrayal about as badly as the more memorable sort.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Rufus muttered. Their last encounter with gangsters was not something he would ever count as a particularly cherished memory.

“So we get out before they know about it,” Wyatt said impatiently. “What, you can’t give Bugsy Malone and his pals over there the slip? You managed it with us often enough.”

“You do know the handover’s supposed to happen in less than an hour, don’t you?”

Wyatt snorted. “What, like you’ll still be in this time by the time they catch up to us?”

Rufus shifted uncomfortably. Things were moving too fast, was the worst of it. A moment’s quiet to tell them what they’d be leaving behind - a moment’s privacy, even, because he was pretty sure this wasn’t something Lucy’d thank him for just blurting out in front of everyone - and that’d be fine. But if they were going to just rush straight out he’d have no chance.

“Enough!” That was Lucy. “Look, there is no way we are going to sneak Garcia out past a whole gang of bootleggers all watching him like hawks. Yeah, maybe we could shoot our way out if it came to that, but there are people I like in this bar, so no. We’re not doing that. Garcia, can you find a way to take Wyatt with you? If they’re planning to ambush you, you’ll need all the firepower you can get. _Modern_ firepower, and we don’t have any of that left.”

“Wait a minute, just you and Rufus? That’s just asking Rittenhouse to go after you!”

“Oh, _thanks_ ,” Rufus muttered.

Lucy glared at him. “We don’t have a whole lot of options here! And, if it comes to it, I’m not helpless either.” She produced a heavy old-fashioned revolver out of her handbag.

“You can use that thing?” Wyatt asked, sounding doubtful.

Flynn snorted. “Of course she can.”

“I’ve done it before,” Lucy said firmly.

“Ok, but even if you can - that’s early 20th-century weaponry, you think Rittenhouse is going to be using that?”

“Probably not,” Lucy admitted. “But if they try to start a gunfight in a boarding-house, they’ll be up to their eyeballs in witnesses before they can do anything about it. There’s no such guarantee at the docks.”

Rufus was just thinking how weird it was to hear this much of Flynn’s first name - sometimes he almost forgot Flynn _had_ a first name - when the rest of that sentence hit him. “Wait. Wait. We’re going back to your apartment? Isn’t that about the first place Rittenhouse are going to look for you?”

Lucy nodded. “We have to. Even leaving aside the things I’d like to keep for their own sake...we might be out of bullets, but Flynn’s modern guns are still there, as is everything we’ve turned up on Rittenhouse, and I don’t want anyone in this time getting a hold of it after we’re gone.”

“You want to...pack a bag?” Rufus questioned, and then figured, well, of course she would if this was going to be their home for the next few decades...you’d get attached to things.

Lucy smiled at that. “Yeah. That too.”

“And, what, those guys’ll just let me come with them?” Wyatt demanded.

Flynn cleared his throat. “They’re not exactly the most trusting of people, ljubavi,” he said, almost apologetically. “If we were to simply exchange guns, however…”

“No.” Wyatt was already shaking his head. “Not a chance-”

“You were the one who didn’t want to go with him,” Lucy reminded him. “If you’re coming with Rufus and me, that’s two guns between us - we can afford to have them be a bit less than perfect.”

There wasn’t really a good argument to that, and so long as they were the only ride home Rufus figured they could give Flynn the better guns this once.

“Just give it to him, man,” he said, annoyed, casting a glance over at the bar. “I’d do it now, because some of those guys are starting to look pretty testy.”

Wyatt huffed. “You’ll have all those guys with you, who’s to say-”

“Wyatt, just give Garcia the damn gun,” Lucy said. It was the tone of voice you’d get from an elementary school teacher and, more surprisingly still, it worked. Grudgingly worked, but still.

After that, it was simple. Flynn went off with his shiny new modern handgun and a disturbingly pleased expression to go and shatter the prohibition laws, and the three of them were on their way back to Mrs Esposito’s boarding house and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Wyatt was in a foul mood all the way across from the edge of the Bowery to Mrs Esposito’s place, and it was looking more and more likely that Rufus wouldn’t have a spare second to tell Lucy about her daughter in private. He’d just have to bite the bullet and do it in front of Wyatt. And hope he didn’t spontaneously combust at the news, because of all the ways this ridiculous little soap opera could’ve become more complicated, this was one nobody could’ve predicted.

*

The streets were a little quieter at this hour, but never entirely quiet, and they still caught their share of stares on the way back. It was making the back of Rufus’ neck itch, to know there was someone after them specifically, instead of them being after Rittenhouse. Wyatt was moving a little more stiffly now, he couldn’t help but noticed, and if their soldier had pulled something they were going to be in no end of trouble. Both Lucy and Rufus had killed before, all right, but it wasn’t something either of them were really _good_ at. Just...circumstances conspiring against, or maybe for, them. Rufus still couldn’t meet his own eyes in the mirror, some days.

The door was standing open when they got back, which was the first sign that something was wrong. The second was the middle-aged Italian woman lying sprawled on the floor when they got inside.

“Mrs Esposito?” Rufus guessed.

Lucy nodded, looking stricken as she went to roll the woman over and take her pulse. “Well, she’s alive at least,” she said grimly. “There should be water through there,” she added, nodding to another door, also standing open.

“Is this really the-”

“I’m not just leaving her like this!”

There was water. Running water, even, which Rufus hadn’t thought they had in neighbourhoods like this in the 1920s, and after a few splashes Mrs Esposito began to come round.

“What...oh. Lucy.”

“I came home and found you like this,” Lucy said quickly. “Are you ok? What happened?”

Mrs Esposito sat up slowly, putting a hand gingerly to her head. “That your ‘brother’” she said disapprovingly, nodding at Wyatt.

Lucy visibly relaxed. “So, you’re fine then.”

The woman gave her a sideways look. “Nice to see you too. Guessing that girl wasn’t your sister any more than he’s your brother.”

“...she is considerably less my sister than he is my brother,” Lucy said, “I...don’t have a sister. She died.” She looked away, reaching up to toy with her locket.

“Sorry, this woman,” Rufus prodded. “Lucy’s non-sister?”

Mrs Esposito gave him a faintly startled look, “He your ‘brother’ too?”

“Just a friend,” Lucy said quickly, “The woman?”

“Oh, her.” Mrs Esposito sniffed. “Well, she came sniffing around with the ‘sister’ story, and I told her straight you never talk about a sister and don’t get on with your family. She already knew you were boarding here - seemed to think you might be in an interesting condition, or expecting to be.”

“I’m not,” Lucy said hastily, and maybe it was just the light, but Rufus could swear she was blushing.

“Well, I saw her off all right. Then I turn around to give the cat its meat and…”

“Could you describe this woman?” Wyatt cut in.

Mrs Esposito frowned. “Uh...tall, red hair - didn’t look much like you, I’ll tell you that,” she added as an aside to Lucy.

“...Emma,” Rufus said, not even surprised anymore. Of course it was Emma. He was starting to wonder if modern-day Rittenhouse even _had_ any other agents, or if they’d sent them all out as sleepers.

“You know her?”

“...we’ve met,” Lucy admitted. “Do you think she’s still in the house? You can’t have been out that long-”

“Let’s go find out,” Wyatt said harshly.

“What- No-”

“Like you said, no-one’s going to start a shootout in the middle of an apartment building-”

“Shoot- Lucy, is- Is he with-”

“No!” Lucy repeated. “He...uh. He was in the war. Still carries his sidearm. You’re not shooting anyone,” she added, which might have halfway convinced anyone who hadn’t seen her shoot Jesse James. “It’s probably just a burglary.”

“I didn’t know you had anything left to burgle,” Mrs Esposito muttered. “Still, it can’t hurt to let him check...”

“I’ll go with them,” Lucy said firmly. “It’s my apartment, and neither of them is going to know if anything’s missing that shouldn’t be.”

“But if that woman is still there-”

“I’ll be fine, Mrs Esposito,” Lucy said, and then. “Let’s go.”

The thing was, there never seemed to be a good time. You couldn’t exactly blurt out ‘by the way you and Flynn have a daughter next year and I know you might not want to stay even knowing that, but you still probably ought to know’ while climbing stairs to investigate what was, almost certainly, a Rittenhouse ambush. Then again, the middle of the speakeasy or the streets or even here in the apartment the first time hadn’t been good times for it either.

The door, when they got there, was closed, which was a good sign. The key was still in the lock, which wasn’t.

“She’s probably still in there,” Lucy said quietly from the top of the stairs when they saw this. “Mrs Esposito didn’t seem to have been out for long, and we’d have heard her leaving.”

“Great,” Wyatt huffed. “Remind me what’s so important in there we have to do this?”

“Two extremely anachronistic handguns and notes on everything we’ve been able to learn about Rittenhouse’s plans since we’ve been here,” Lucy retorted. “ _None_ of which can be allowed to fall into the wrong hands!”

“So why didn’t you take them with you the first time?” Wyatt hissed back.

“I was a bit preoccupied, okay!”

“Uh, guys,” Rufus cut in, “Ambush? Rittenhouse? Right behind that door? That...should be our priority here, right?”

Lucy seemed to shake herself. “Yes, that. Hm. Probably best to keep clear of the direct line of fire as far as possible...one on each side of the door, do you think?”

“Sounds good to me,” Wyatt agreed. “Rufus, you want to take that side?”

It was about then that Lucy produced the revolver from out of her purse and took up a position on the far side of the door with her back pressed to the adjoining wall. Rufus ended up next to Wyatt, a little further away from the door. He wasn’t altogether sure what good it was supposed to do, since he was now the only one in the group that _didn’t_ have a gun, but getting shot and getting them all stranded wasn’t going to do anyone any good either.

“All right,” Wyatt said in a low voice. “On three.”

They didn’t get to three. At two, Lucy reached to one side, turned the handle, and threw the door open. There came the muffled pop of a silenced handgun - wide, Emma must’ve been planning to shoot the first person through the door - and then a muffled curse. Rufus, cursing the fact that he was now the only one in the group without a gun - he didn’t particularly want to shoot anyone, but you’d think with the amount of trouble they got into some means of self-defence would be _nice_ \- followed Wyatt and Lucy into the apartment, both their guns aimed squarely at Emma’s head.

“...well,” Emma said, blinking. “Looks like the cavalry turned up after all. We pretty much figured you weren’t coming.”

“Yeah, well, you figured wrong,” Wyatt snapped.

Emma sighed. “You know I can still kill her, right? Not like she’s going to actually use that thing.” She gave an amused, contemptuous little nod at the gun. “She could barely kill to save her own life, last time.”

“I still did it, though,” Lucy said levelly. “I was going to kill you both, and me with you. This should be much easier.”

“Besides,” Rufus added, “Even if you do get Lucy, Wyatt gets you. So...not really seeing how this works out well for you.”

Emma was still glaring at Lucy. “You think your soldier boy’s that fast, do you?”

“You should know how little a quick-draw can count for, after that long in the Old West.” Lucy lifted the gun a little. “Where are the rest?”

“Down at the docks.” Emma smirked. “You should’ve seen the look on Carol’s face when she turned up those records.  If she thought you were a disappointment before...That’s half of why they sent us here - can’t have anyone sullying that precious, _precious_ Rittenhouse bloodline.” She gave a derisive little snort.  
“My _mother_ is here?” Lucy said, incredulous. “I thought they stopped sending her after us after Salem.”

“After you, maybe. Why do you think I’m the one here and she’s down at the docks dealing with the psycho.”

“You’ve got some nerve calling _anyone_ a psycho-” Lucy snapped.

Emma ignored her. “I was a bit shocked too - I mean,” she added, with a bitter little mirthless laugh. “Didn’t picture you slumming it in a place like this, princess. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Even in the slums, you manage to land on top of the heap. The 1880s were a lot less comfortable.”

“Less- What is this to you, a competition?” Lucy demanded.

Emma rolled her eyes. “You know, this really is the end of the line for you. They might’ve let you come back before Salem, but now? All the pure blood in the world won’t save you now.”

Rufus raised his eyebrows. “...you sure this is the right time for that speech? What with the whole Mexican standoff we’ve got going on here?” Also, could she sound more like a Death Eater if she tried? Well, all right, probably she could, but not without actually saying the words ‘mudblood’ or ‘avada kedavra’, neither of which sounded likely.

Emma paused for a moment, then shifted, the gun tracking from Lucy to Wyatt. “You’re right,” she said. “I can’t shoot you without him getting me. Fortunately, I’m not the one packing six-shooters.”

This time, the gunshot was ear-splitting. Blood welled from Emma’s arm, and the modern handgun clattered to the ground.

“Neighbours’ll be out any second,” Lucy said. She was breathing hard, a few locks of hair falling out from under her hat. “Rufus, get her gun.”  
Rufus bent to pick it up. It was still loaded, except for two shots, and very heavy in his hand. Still, it felt better to have it than not.

“I count three guns to none, “ Wyatt said, and half-turned to look at Lucy. “So, do we-”

He didn’t get to finish his question. Emma had bolted. One hand pressed tightly over the wound to her arm, she was still moving a lot faster than anyone could justify after something like that - running on adrenaline, probably. But she wasn’t pushing past them. Instead, she was making for the bedroom, making for the window. Wyatt’s second shot broke the glass as she dragged the window open and slid out onto the fire escape outside - Rufus hadn’t even known they _had_ fire escapes this early - just as there was a clattering of feet outside the door.

Lucy swore under her breath, “Neighbours,”

she muttered. “Witnesses. Probably coming to see what the excitement is. We’ll have to work fast. I’ll...give them a story. Mrs Esposito already thinks there’s a burglar, I can play on that. You two…” she shook her head. “Stay in here. It’ll just cause more trouble if you’re seen here, and I’d rather not explain that as well as all the shooting. The guns and the notebook with the Rittenhouse information are under a loose floorboard beside the bed. That’s the priority, everything else…” she looked genuinely a little stricken as she glanced around the place. “We’ll have to leave it.”

“Lucy,” Wyatt started, “Are you-”

“I’m fine. We should hurry - I- we need to get to the docks!”

The pocket door rattled closed behind her, and then there was the sound of the other door opening, and Lucy’s voice, only slightly muffled. Rufus looked around for the floorboard, trying to ignore the rumpled bedding and bits of unidentifiable 1920s underwear hanging from the rail, but was taken aback when Wyatt spoke up behind him.

“Please tell me you're as lost as I am as to what the _hell_ is going on.”

Rufus blinked. “Well, Flynn’s busy getting ambushed by Lucy’s mom at the docks, Emma is...I don’t know, probably going to join in or get medical attention or something, Lucy’s trying to stave off a bunch of curious New Yorkers and we’re...standing around in here trying to recover a few extra guns and whatever it is they’ve found about Rittenhouse.” Wyatt gave him an incredulous look, and Rufus shrugged. “You asked.”

“I meant what's going on between Lucy and _Flynn_.”

Oh. Right. That. “I don’t know,” Rufus said, honestly, wishing he wasn’t having this conversation in general, and specifically that he wasn’t having it here, in the back room of a New York tenement with a Rittenhouse agent on the loose nearby. Once, just once, he’d like to get through a mission without any of this soap opera shit. “Maybe they got a bit too into character. Maybe this is just what happens when you spend years trapped together with no other options. Maybe they just like each other, how would I know?”

The likeliest-looking floorboard extended under the bed, Rufus noticed, and went to kneel down beside it, wondering if it would just come out or need to be levered first. Probably levered. Rufus looked up for something to pry it with and with a small huff, Wyatt handed him a nail to prise it out with. Of course the silence didn't last long.

“We should never have left them here, especially not for _three years_. That's longer than Lucy’s even known us!”

“You were kind of bleeding to death at the time, remember?” Rufus pointed out. “If the Mothership hadn’t jumped here, we’d have tried for earlier, but since next year was the earliest we could find any record of them-”

“What record? What'd you guys find?”

Rufus shifted. “I...we sort of started with death records, went back from there. Flynn dies in ‘47, Lucy sometime in the ‘50s,” he hedged.

From the ashen look on Wyatt’s face he didn't like the sound of it. “ _Death_ records?” He asked, aghast.

“Well...yeah. The timeline changed when we left them there and then couldn’t go back for them straight away, and since this trip hadn’t happened yet, that...meant they lived out their lives here.” Rufus looked back down at the floorboard, trying not to think about what else that had meant.

“You know, sometimes this time travel stuff still gives me a headache.” Wyatt sighed and muttered, “Finding someone because of their death records- Wait, you said the 50s, right? So what happens next year?”

Rufus coughed. “Uh…”

“Rufus,” Wyatt said. “Last time I saw you like this, it was because of those recordings Connor was having you do.”

“It’s nothing like-” Rufus started, then stopped. Ok, it was a bit like. He hadn’t wanted to be the one keeping that secret either. “It’s Lucy’s business. If I haven’t told her, I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, you mean like you couldn’t tell Jiya about me and Lucy-”

“You’re not Jiya.” Rufus shrugged. “She wanted to know why you two were acting strangely all of a sudden.”

“I’m getting a lot of double standards here, Rufus. What do you know that I don’t?”

“Double- What do you mean, double standards? I tell my girlfriend things that I don’t tell you. I didn’t think you and Lucy getting together was a secret until you went back to Jessica. None of that’s the same as telling you this when _I_ don’t even like knowing when they don’t!”

“Then why are you keeping it a secret, Rufus?”

“Because- Look, there just hasn’t been a good time, ok? How do you think they’d take it if I just sat them down in the speakeasy and said-” he cut himself off. “Like I said, not a good time.”

Thankfully, before Wyatt could continue giving him the third degree, Lucy came into the room.

“All clear,” she said, looking worried, “Or, it is so far - I gave them the story about a burglar and most of them believed it - well, some of them are a bit sceptical about our having anything worth stealing, but...aside from that.”

“Cool,” Rufus said stiffly, as the floorboard finally lifted a little, just enough to get a hand in, if you weren’t worried about it snapping back. When Lucy had said a loose floorboard, he’d expected something a bit more movable.

Wyatt shifted to get help Rufus, but while he was stuck with one hand under the boards, Wyatt chose that moment to say, “So, Rufus had something he wanted to tell you, Lucy.”

Lucy frowned. “Something so important it can’t wait until we’re out of here?”

“It...would kinda defeat the point if I did,” Rufus was forced to admit.

Lucy nodded. “Ok, hit me with it. Is- No-one’s dead, are they? Hurt? You didn’t say how long it’s been for you-”

“No-one’s dead,” Rufus said quickly. “Well, not yet. Not on our end, anyway.”

“Then what-”

There was a hammering on the door in the other room.

“Not more of your neighbours,” Wyatt groaned.

Lucy shook her head, “They wouldn’t knock.”

“Mrs Flynn! Mrs- Lucy, are you in there? Ben Kowalski’s sent his boy Jacob for the police for you - maybe see if we can get some of what they took back. Should be here soon enough - Lucy? You there? Ben said he’d seen you. It’s Mrs Esposito-”

Lucy hissed. “We’d better go - you can tell me at the Lifeboat. The police don’t respond that fast around here, but the longer we stay, the more likely we’ll run into them on the way out. Rufus, do you have them?”

Rufus’ fingers closed on the edge of a box. “I got it!”

“Then we should get out of here before the cops show up,” Wyatt said, “Fire escape?”

“Better than the stairs,” Lucy agreed. “Come on.”

*

It was full dark by the time they got to the docks, even at the pace they’d taken it at. There were already streetlights, at least, but since the irresistible urge to smash them was apparently one thing that hadn’t changed in almost a century, that wasn’t very much use for finding their way by. Fortunately, Lucy seemed to know the way. Which...kinda made Rufus wonder if she was a bit more involved with the bootlegging side of things than she’d let on. Everyone at the speakeasy had seemed to know her, but had that just been because she was supposedly married to one of the local boss’s lackeys. He considered, for a moment, what Flynn would make of that description, and resolved to use it at the next possible opportunity, just to see the look on his face.

On the plus side, Rufus wasn’t the only one left unarmed anymore. On the minuses, it wasn’t as if he had much more of an idea with what to do with a gun than ‘point and shoot’. He hadn’t thought Lucy did either - all right, there’d been Jesse James, but that had been at almost point-blank range on a stationary target - but apparently three years could change a lot of things.

“So, plan?” he asked, since somebody had to.

“We get in, we find my mother and Emma, we get Garcia, we get out,” Lucy said simply.

“...oh, that’s not vague at all,” Rufus muttered. “Want to go one step further and include ‘don’t get shot’, or is that being too optimistic?”

Lucy shrugged, “Not like we have much more to go on. If they were after anything bigger that we knew about, maybe, but since there isn’t, we need to get out before they get another shot.” She gave a rueful little grin. “Maybe I should be flattered, if we’re worth sending a whole team after even stranded here without access to the Lifeboat.”

“Maybe they knew we’d rescue you,” Wyatt pointed out.

“After three years?” Lucy looked away. “Even _I’d_ started to wonder if you were ever coming.”

Well, it was starting to look as if it’d have to be now or never.

“Yeah,” Rufus started, “Uh, about that-”

He was cut off yet again by the sound of gunfire.

“Machine guns,” Wyatt said, casting a look at Lucy. “Think that’s-”

“Could be Rittenhouse, could be another gang,” Lucy admitted, looking worried. “We need to hurry - quickly, come on!”

And, ok, Rufus still wasn’t quite sure what running straight into a gang fight was supposed to do if not get them all killed...but Lucy had already taken off, and Wyatt after her, and it wasn’t as if it was the 1920s that were going to kill Rufus, he had it on good authority.

The warehouse, when they got there, was in carnage, bullets ricocheting off the girders so that even the high catwalk they had entered by was not safe. It was too open for any attempt at stealth to bear fruit, and even if one side looked to have tried to make a makeshift barricade of the crates that filled the warehouse, it hadn’t been enough to do much more than slow a bullet down. Already, there were bodies scattered on the floor, those who hadn’t got to cover quick enough. Two last, desperate holdouts behind the girders on the far side of the room, ducking out every few moments to fire at a throng of heavily-armed men with modern-looking machine guns rattling away.

Carol Preston stood at the back of the group, smugly impeccable, unarmed. There were a fair few fallen Rittenhouse guys too, less numerous than the ones in what was apparently the uniform bootlegger’s striped suit, but enough of them to be sure Flynn hadn’t lost his homicidal touch. Which- How strange were their lives that that was something to be relieved by?

Lucy paused for only a moment before she was at the railing, heedless of Wyatt’s attempt to pull her back before the next bullet caught her instead. Rufus takes aim at the mass of armed men, his stomach still churning - the last time he’d killed - with his own hands, not like the death of the judge in Salem - it had been one of Flynn’s guys in 1969, and that had been hard enough, even knowing it had been that man or him. Now, with no such justifications, it was a lot harder to pull the trigger, even with the knowledge that these were men who’d killed a whole warehouse’s worth of not-exactly-innocent bystanders just to get to Flynn.

He squeezed the trigger anyway, trying not to aim at any one man in particular - they stood so close together, shielding Carol from the view of the far side, where Flynn and the surviving bootlegger were still holed up.

A man fell, almost silent except for his gun clattering to the floor as his fingers slackened in death. Carol didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she thought that had been Flynn, but then then another man crumpled, a bullet to the back of the head, and Carol turned and looked straight at them. One of the goon squad, a little brighter than his fellows, turned to follow her, already lifting his gun, but Carol slapped it down with a glare. Which...what, the woman was prepared to see her daughter hanged as a witch, but not shot? Or not shot _in front of her_? Sometimes, Rittenhouse people confused the hell out of Rufus. Most of the time, actually. Still, no sense in standing around up here in plain view for the moment when the Rittenhouse guys figured out that, even if Lucy being the boss’s kid meant that killing her would probably go badly for them, Rufus and Wyatt were still wide open.

“Lucy!” Carol called, her voice echoing around the warehouse as the three of them scrambled for the stairs. “This really is for your own good, you know.”

“ _Hunting_ me?” Lucy snapped back breathlessly from just behind Rufus. “I can’t see how killing me does me any good, Mom!”

“I’m not trying to kill you!” Carol retorted. Now, why didn’t Rufus believe her? “Lucy! Lucy, will you stop and think for a moment?”

“Don’t listen,” Wyatt snarled.

“Rittenhouse could have ignored all of this,” Carol called out, “So long as you remained in the past, so long as you weren’t on the Lifeboat, but _this-_ ”

“You thought I’d stop fighting you just because I got stranded?” Lucy yelled back.

“Clearly she doesn’t know you very well,” said Flynn’s voice, echoing through the warehouse, his voice only a little strained.

“Your great-grandfather isn’t unreasonable. He was willing to let me have you back after Salem. He’d have left you alone here, as a kindness to me, so long as you did not return to our time, but to see the blood of David Rittenhouse himself mingled with that of the man who killed our founder?” Carol’s voice was dripping with condescension now. “To suffer some mongrel great-grandchild spreading the bloodline thinner with every year-”

“ _That’s_ what this is about?” Lucy demanded, nearly skidding to a halt. “Who fathers my kid? Well, you’ve got _no_ worries,” she snarled, half turning back to face her mother even with the stairs just in sight, “I wouldn’t pass on all this pure-blood _shit_ if you paid me! Don’t worry, _Mom_ , the Rittenhouse line is going to end right here, with me. I wouldn’t wish it on my kid if I were the last woman on earth!”

They were at the top of the stairs now, heading down, a few stray bullets embedding themselves in the catwalk behind them, and there at the bottom, moving fast to join them, was Flynn, busily reloading Wyatt’s borrowed pistol as he went.

“Is anyone-” Lucy started,

“All dead,” Flynn said curtly. “I wasn’t expecting this many - they’ve only ever sent one or two before. They must have packed the Mothership to capacity to bring all these people-.”

“Consider it a compliment,” Rufus interrupted, “So, how do we get out? I mean...this was a mob deal, right? Had to be a way out if the cops turned up.”

“There was, and you came in by it - we’ll have to make a run for it.”

There was a sound that Rufus was now, from far too much experience of people trying to kill him, able to identify as guns being loaded.

Running for your life was not an experience you ever exactly got used to, but it was one you got better at. Well, it was for most people. By the time they stepped outside, Wyatt was grey-faced and clutching at his leg, and when he pulled his hand away there was blood soaking through his trousers.

“Were you hit?” Lucy demanded, half-dragging him after her - looking back, Rufus could see the first of their pursuers clearing the door of the warehouse.

“Nah. Wound’s re-opened. Same one we lost you over.”

Flynn’s eyebrows knitted. “Agent Christopher let you out on that?”

“She didn’t have much choice!”

“Lifeboat’s this way,” Rufus cut in, “We should get going before Lucy’s mom catches up to us.”

No gunshots - not even Rittenhouse would risk a gunfight somewhere this public, just in case the consequences of it being reported screwed up their master plan - if they could just get to the Lifeboat ahead of them, they’d be fine-

Of course, the moment they got to the warehouse where the Lifeboat was being kept they’d be under fire again. It had been that sort of a day.

They were moving more slowly now, just out of necessity, as Wyatt’s limp got worse and worse with each successive step, until he was leaning on Rufus for support.

It didn’t take long to reach the warehouse where they’d left the lifeboat, even so - it wasn’t quite next door, but close enough to make no odds - and, even more surprisingly, they managed to make it to the Lifeboat before anything went spectacularly wrong. Perhaps they’d even lost their pursuers - stranger things had happened, and the crowds had been thick enough that they might well have gotten lost in them at least long enough to disappear down a side-street and into another warehouse.

Of course, that hope lasted all of five seconds when the door swung open hard enough to bounce off the wall and yet another gunshot rang out and ricocheted off the Lifeboat door. They were lucky it had been only the door - if they’d hit any of the machinery, they might as well give up here and now. Wyatt had been half in when it happened, having grudgingly accepted a leg up from Flynn when his leg proved too badly hurt to make the jump, and nearly slipped out altogether when Flynn twisted instinctively to the door, one hand going to the gun tucked into his coat. Lucy and Rufus grabbed a wrist each and heaved Wyatt in, another bullet whizzing narrowly overhead as Flynn turned and fired. The first man went down, and Flynn twisted back around to clamber in, turning to fire another shot before the door slid shut behind them and Rufus finally laid hands on the controls and powered up.

Pre-flight checks, safety checks, as fast as he could make them - he knew he was forgetting something, but any moment one of those bullets might hit something they couldn’t afford to lose, and then they really would be done for - and slid the clutch out ready to take off.

Thirty seconds later, the last bullet fired bounced off the back wall of an abandoned warehouse.

When he glanced back, Lucy and Flynn were sitting huddled together like a couple of extras from _Titanic_ during the lifeboat scene, leaning into each other. Rufus was suddenly very glad that, as the pilot, he had every reason not to be paying attention to what was happening in the back.

“-might have shot her,” Flynn was saying, in a tone that might pass for sheepish. “Not fatally, I don’t think - not much time to aim under the circumstances, but-”

“I shot Emma.” That was Lucy. She sounded almost numb. “I guess they’ll have to match.”

There was a short burst of slightly hysteric-sounding laughter, but it trailed off quickly, and, all at once, Rufus knew what it was that had slipped his mind in the firefight.

Oh.

Oh, _shit_.

The two of them were still talking in low voices behind him, but suddenly Rufus couldn’t hear a word of what they were saying.

It wasn’t- It wasn’t about thinking they should’ve stayed. Flynn he could pretty much take or leave, but he’d missed Lucy, and they needed their historian around. Besides, even if they’d wanted to stay, there was no guarantee they could’ve, now Rittenhouse was hunting them in the present as well as the past. But. Still. After Amy - the original Amy, Lucy’s Amy, Amy _Preston_ , whom he’d never met, but heard enough about to feel he knew her - he couldn’t imagine what finding out it had happened again would do to Lucy, when she didn’t even have memories this time.

He didn’t know he’d had much of a choice even so - even if he’d told them the moment they all sat down in the Blind Tiger, and they’d said they wanted to stay, from the moment Emma had appeared he couldn’t see how things could’ve gone differently. That ought to have counted for more than it did, with guilt. Then again, he still saw the sleeper from the 1980s, still saw Judge Sewall’s face in his mind’s eye, and no amount of Jiya telling him he’d done everything he could to save the man had done anything to help with that.

He ended up setting the Lifeboat down harder than he should’ve - he could practically _hear_ Connor’s affronted British ‘steady on!’, same as after every single training flight he’d taken before he got the hang of it.

“Wyatt’s hurt,” he called as the door slid open, “Rittenhouse turned up, so we had to run - turns out that leg’s a lot less fine than he said it was.”

“Wyatt!” Jessica cried out and dashed over to help them out of the lifeboat, looking rather worried at the amount of blood staining Wyatt’s clothes.

“‘m fine,” Wyatt managed. “It’s not as bad as it looks-”

“No,” Flynn said casually, offering Lucy a hand down. “It’s _exactly_ as bad as it looks. The rest of us had to carry him into the Lifeboat.”

Agent Christopher frowned. “I thought I said to leave the heavy lifting to Flynn this time,” she scolded.

“I _did_ do the heavy lifting. He isn’t light, you know.” Flynn quipped over his shoulder, which earned him a glare from Wyatt and a flicker of a smile from Lucy before her face closed off again.

“So,” Connor put in from the monitors, “What _was_ Rittenhouse after? None of us could figure it out.”

Lucy finally looked up at them all and straightened her spine. Rufus noticed that she wasn’t even an arm’s length away from Flynn, who stood beside her like a pillar, or possibly an unusually troublesome tree. “They were after us. My mother was there, along with Emma. Apparently they...wanted to kill us before…” Lucy trailed off and looked at Rufus. Rufus who realized with the force of a brick wall that he was the only one left who knew anything about Amy Lorena Flynn.

“Before?” Connor prodded.

Lucy folded her arms. “Before I went and ruined Rittenhouse’s little breeding programme, from the sound of it.” Her tone was hard, almost clinical, but Rufus could almost feel the anger bubbling under every word.

“Breeding programme?” Agent Christopher repeated, sounding understandably revolted by the whole idea.

Lucy shrugged. “They care a lot about  bloodlines,” she said, a little distantly, as if it were some piece of historical trivia. “And they like to keep power in ‘the right families’. People have been arranging marriages on more or less the same principles for centuries - Rittenhouse just updated their methods.”

“What about the rank-and-file?” Jessica asked, frowning a little. “They can’t all come from these ‘right families’, can they?”

“They don’t, but the Old Families are the ones in charge and...apparently my ancestors have been Old Family Rittenhouse since-” Lucy glanced away, “Since the start.”

Rufus coughed, “So, not to interrupt this latest example of why Rittenhouse are basically American Muggle Death Eaters, but the point is, they didn’t get what they wanted this time.”

Well. They didn’t kill either Lucy or Flynn. Quite a lot of other people, but none of the team, which was...well, not _good,_ but less personal.

Flynn narrowed his eyes, “What I don’t understand is why the sudden full force assault _now_ , when we were there for three years before that.”

Rufus shifted uncomfortably. But- Well. He’d held off when it really mattered once already. He could wait a little longer to give them the news in private.

Agent Christopher shrugged. “We had trouble tracking you - maybe they did too. We couldn’t find any mention of either of you in the public record until the name Garcia Flynn popped up in the news report on the East River Massacre of 1923.”

“What East River Mas- Oh.” Lucy had gone white. “Oh. The- Did this massacre involve an entire bootlegging gang murdered in a warehouse by the East River, by any chance? That was Rittenhouse.”

Rufus coughed. “Uh...yeah. In the timeline I remember, we tracked them down through the public record system. Censuses, death certificates…that sort of thing. No massacres involved.”

Agent Christopher sighed, “Yet another timeline change. Do I want to know how you got involved in that massacre beyond one side being Rittenhouse?”

“Had to pay the bills _somehow_.” Flynn snarked, “And bootlegging was the ‘in’ thing that decade.”

“Of course it was,” Agent Christopher said, with a roll of her eyes. “Well, you’re both back in one piece and Rittenhouse doesn’t seem to be ruling the world, so we’ll call this one a success.”

“Would you?” Lucy said, in that same odd, slightly distant tone. Rufus was abruptly reminded she’d _known_ half those guys they’d seen caught up in the massacre at the warehouse. Flynn reached out to put an arm around her, which got Wyatt glaring. Great. As if that whole soap opera hadn’t been complicated enough _before_.

“So,” Lucy said after a moment, leaning into Flynn a little, “If there’s nothing else, I’ve wanted nothing more than a 21st-century shower and not to have to wear a corset for three years, so…”

“Of course,” Agent Christopher said, with a little twitch of the mouth. “Wyatt, with me, I want another look at that leg.”

“...right,” Wyatt muttered, leaning on Jessica and looking distinctly sour.

“You were always a dreadful patient,” Jessica said, nudging him a little before steadying him. “Come on, before it turns green and falls off or something.”  
Rufus looked around for Jiya, and for once didn’t see her. “Is Jiya ok?”

“She had another of her ‘visions’,” Connor said, looking worried, “I said I’d handle things here while she had a lie down - she looked like she needed it.”

If Jiya had _agreed_ to go and have a lie down it must’ve been, Rufus thought.

“Right, then, I’m just going to go-” he made a vague gesture in the direction of their room. Jiya’s room. Honestly, it was kind of hard to keep track of any room allocation but Connor’s right now, and that was only because he was the only one not even tangentially involved in the soap opera life in the bunker had turned into after the Hollywood mission.

When he got in, Jiya was curled up on the bed with her laptop out, watching what sounded like _The Wrath of Khan_.

“Hey,” she said, looking up and giving him a slightly wan smile. She looked almost ill, which was a worse sign even than that would usually imply, because usually these sorts of visions didn’t _have_ after-effects.

“Hey,” Rufus replied, crossing over to sit next to her on the bed. “So, the 1920s were a lot less glamorous this time around.”

Jiya laughed. “No Josephine Baker this time?”

“Not even close.”  He took another look at her - the circles under her eyes were deeper even than usual and, ok, he didn’t want to push, didn’t want to coddle, because Jiya didn’t need either - and asked. “So. Connor said you had another vision.”

“Oh- It’s...much less dramatic than he makes it sound,” Jiya said, with a quick, there-and-gone sort of smile.

“So...what did you see?”

“I don’t know.” Jiya was looking at him now, Captain Kirk forgotten. “I mean...I do know. I just don’t know what it means. I was in this one.”

“ _You_ were?” That was new. She’d never seen herself in one of these visions before.

“Yeah. In cowboy times.” She caught his eye. They both knew what that one meant. “I was...older. I don’t know how much older - a couple years, maybe.”

It took a few moments for that one to sink in. “So...it’s a few years away,” Rufus said, desperate relief flooding over him. “We’ve got time to change things, time to work out what’s going on.”

“I- I don’t know. Maybe it’s changed,” Jiya raked a hand through her hair and sat up a little. “You didn’t look any older in my first vision, but now-”

“Or it could be after that,” Rufus pointed out, an awful thought striking him. “When you’re the only pilot left.”

“It’s not going to happen that way,” Jiya said stubbornly, setting her chin. “I won’t let it. I told you, we’ll figure this out. Maybe...maybe you don’t go on the mission now? Maybe I go instead, so you won’t-”

“So you get killed instead? Everyone in here’s risking their lives every day, Jiya-”

“I don’t know.” Jiya admitted. “It’s...I don’t know what it means, or whether it can change or any of it. Maybe we really _can’t_ change things.”

“Well,” Rufus said, a little grimly. “I think today pretty much proves we can.”

And then he told her. All of it. Everything they’d found before the mission started, and everything that had happened after.

“-I don’t know what that means, since the first timeline was a change too, but this...it definitely means things change. I mean, things already changed, look at all those women in Salem, but-”

“Yeah.” Jiya looked grim. “I...did a bit of digging on that. They...it took a few years, but they all died. Typhoid, dysentery, strange accidents...they had a few borrowed years, but, except Abiah Franklin…”

“They- All of them?”

“All of them.” Jiya’s face was grim. “But this...history changed, and changed back. I don’t know if that counts. Do they know?”

“Not yet.” Rufus let out a breath. “...I’m going to have to tell them. I mean...if it was you and me that got trapped there, if it was our kid...I’d want to know. Even after it got changed.”

“Would you?” Jiya asked, looking back at the screen. “I’m not sure I would.”

Rufus shrugged. “Ok, maybe I wouldn’t want to know. But that doesn’t mean I’d want someone else to know, and not tell me.”

Which was how he ended up in the kitchen, after he and Jiya had talked themselves out about history, and whether it could be changed, and whether, if they looked, they would find that nineteenth-century John Doe already, the same way the timeline had stood still after they’d brought JFK to the future despite it taking most of a day to return him, waiting for Lucy.

When Lucy came in, she was fresh from the shower and looked a lot more like her old self, although Rufus was pretty sure that grey sweater had started as one of Flynn’s.

“So,” Rufus said, “You...remember I said there was something I wanted to talk to you about?”

Lucy stopped halfway through tetting a mug out of one of the cupboards. “...yes. With everything that happened at the end there, you never got ‘round to it. What was it? Has Jiya had another-”

“No.” Rufus paused. “Well, yes, but didn’t happen until we’d already left. She’s fine,” he added, “But what I wanted to tell you...it’s about how Rittenhouse knew to go after you then. And where to find you.”

Lucy drew in a breath. “I can make a guess. My dying childless wouldn’t have had much of an effect on the ‘pure line of Rittenhouse’ line my mother was spouting. Or not more of an effect than killing me in that warehouse. So...you knew too?”

Rufus nodded. “It was how we found you,” he admitted. “I mean...there were death records for the ‘40s and ‘50s, and a census in 1930 - you apparently moved to Queens sometime before then - but we couldn’t find anything close enough until we found a birth certificate for November 1924.” He paused, and added. “I was going to tell you, but first Wyatt was there and I figured it’d be hard enough without dragging it into that whole drama, and then we were being shot at, and-”

“No,” Lucy said, her voice only a little strained. “No, it’s fine. I...thanks. He just cornered me about Garcia on the way out of the shower as it is, it’d only be worse if he knew. I forgot he got like this.”

Rufus shrugged. “Yeah. Great guy, but this whole thing with you and Jessica...it’s like he’s forgotten anyone else can even have problems.”

Lucy didn’t say anything, but from the look on her face she didn’t need to.

“Here.” Rufus held out the flashdrive. “We were supposed to show you this. Had a laptop in the Lifeboat so we could, and everything. Everything we could dig up on Amy Lorena Flynn.”

Lucy’s face twisted with pain. “Amy,” she repeated.

“Yeah.” Rufus shrugged. “She’s...she was pretty amazing, it sounded like.”

Lucy took the drive with fingers that were not - quite - shaking. She looked down on it, and gave an odd little snorting laugh. “No- It’s just- It’s funny. I never...I always sort of assumed, before, that I’d have children. Mom wanted grandchildren, and I...well, I didn’t mind the idea. I sort of assumed I’d meet someone and...but then I found out about Rittenhouse. That I was-”

“Apparently at least one version of you changed your mind,” Rufus said awkwardly.

“So...what happens now?” Lucy said, half to herself, looking down again at the flashdrive.

“I don’t know,” Rufus admitted.

Lucy grimaced. “...not like staying was an option even if I’d known,” she said, though it sounded more like she was convincing herself than him. “Once Rittenhouse knew…”

“Yeah,” Rufus agreed, maybe a little too fast, but he wanted it to be true as much as she did. “I mean...with what your mom was saying back there…”

“She’d rather see me dead than alive and doing something outside her plans for me,” Lucy said, her mouth twisting. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”

Rufus thought, absurdly, of his own mom, and how rarely he’d been able to call her since they went underground, how much of Kevin’s life he was missing. Some of what she’d had to say about that in the phone calls had been bad enough - he couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to have her want him dead.

“You ok?” he asked.

“...no,” Lucy admitted. “I wasn’t expecting to be. We got out alive and a lot of other people I knew didn’t. I don’t know how I’ll feel, in the morning. Probably worse. It hasn’t really sunk in yet.” She snorted. “God, I still had a library book out…”

“What sort of late fines do they give you for keeping a book out for ninety-five years?”

Lucy snorted. “Probably they’ll cut off a limb.”

And, just like that they were laughing, almost hysterically, half leaning against the countertops, breathless with it. And it was- It wasn’t even funny, but this whole damn day, the trip to the ‘20s, nearly getting shot Rufus didn’t know how many times, this awful secret and Jiya’s vision...it was too much for anyone to stand without laughing or screaming or maybe both at once.

Lucy ran out of breath first, gasping as the laughter trailed off, though her shoulders were still shaking.

Rufus straightened up a little to look at her. “Hey. Evil librarians aside...I’m glad you’re back.”

Lucy smiled at that, a little wanly, and hugged him before he could move away.

“I...think I will be too,” she said, “Just...give it time.”


End file.
